Playing Resistance

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will host Aleksandr Veselov for a presentation on his ongoing research into contemporary Russian video games as spaces of memory, social critique, and reflection on the transformations of political engagement in present-day Russia.

"This project explores how contemporary Russian independent video games have become a way of remembering protest, repression, and everyday civic resistance. Since the mid-2010s, small game projects have often responded more quickly and more freely than official culture to the narrowing of public speech in Russia. Early protest games still carried the energy of political mobilization and imagined the player as someone capable of acting, resisting, or at least taking part in a shared civic struggle. Over time, however, this figure begins to change. As repression grows stronger and public protest becomes harder to sustain, the active political subject gives way to more fragile figures: the bystander, the victim, the survivor, or the witness. The project follows this transformation through games connected with anti-corruption activism, prison, mourning, and digital remembrance. It also turns to games that speak about life in Russia more indirectly, through grotesque humor, absurd situations, surreal spaces, and the mechanics of endurance. A central place in the project is given to the Samosbor universe, where the player cannot truly change the world, but can still survive inside it, observe its violence, and refuse to accept its logic as normal. The final part of the project examines games about mobilization and ordinary people suddenly drawn into state violence. In these works, resistance is no longer heroic or programmatic. It appears through refusal, avoidance, ridicule, friendship, and small attempts to preserve one’s selfhood. By reading these games as records of political and emotional experience, the project shows how contemporary Russian video games trace the erosion of political agency while also imagining fragile, indirect ways of recovering it."

Aleksandr Veselov holds a PhD in Social Philosophy and works at the intersection of memory studies, digital anthropology, and game studies. His research focuses on cultural memory, emotions, and the representation of Soviet and post-Soviet history in video games. He is also the creator of Video Games with History, a media project dedicated to the study of history and cultural memory in video games.